WE are now three weeks in to the new PDC Premier League season, and so far a numerous amount of flaws have already been seen.
Before the ‘major’ got underway, Luke Littler and Josh Rock, two of the sports most exciting players had only played each other three times. Now with the knockout style format taking place every Thursday we could potentially see them play weekly for the next 14 weeks.
This can, and in my opinion does, make the sport less exciting in other big majors. This is the 4th year of the format, and after year two we got a majorly exciting draw of Luke Littler vs Michael Van Gerwen in the 1st round of the sports second biggest major, The World Matchplay. The 32 best players all for one trophy. It is randomly drawn, and when these two mega names came out it should’ve been a day in history for the sport. Instead, we had already seen it nine times in 17 weeks of The Premier League.
What makes this worse is that the premier league prize money does not go onto the order of merit, and with all the intense travelling for different competitions all over the world, this means that players are regularly dropping out of Players Championship events, causing havoc with the Order Of Merit.
One last issue I have is when a player drops out the game is just null and void. If a player would have to miss a game due to illness / injury in the old format then it would just be played on a different date.
I understand the decision making on the PDC’s part needs to be on ticket sales, but entertainment matters too, and currently the Premier League is a boring merry-go-round.
